Building Virtual Earth Observatories Using Ontologies and Linked Geospatial Data

Advances in remote sensing technologies have enabled public and commercial organizations to send an ever-increasing number of satellites in orbit around Earth. As a result, Earth Observation (EO) data has been constantly increasing in volume in the last few years, and is currently reaching petabytes in many satellite archives. For example, the multi-mission data archive of the TELEIOS partner German Aerospace Center (DLR) is expected to reach 2 PB next year, while ESA estimates that it will be archiving 20 PB of data before the year 2020. As the volume of data in satellite archives has been increasing, so have the scientific and commercial applications of EO data. Nevertheless, it is estimated that up to 95% of the data present in existing archives has never been accessed, so the potential for increasing exploitation is very big. TELEIOS is a recent European project that addresses the need for scalable access to PBs of Earth Observation data and the effective discovery of knowledge hidden in them. TELEIOS started on September 2010 and it will last for 3 years. Up to now, the project has made significant progress in the development of stateof-the-art techniques in Scientific Databases, Semantic Web and Image Mining and have applied them to the management of EO data. In the rest of this technical communication we outline the contributions of TELEIOS, and explain why it goes significantly beyond operational systems currently deployed in various EO data centers and Earth Observation portals such as EOWEB-NG. We also present its main technical contributions related to ontologies and linked geospatial data.